Conscious Growth Creation
Are you ready for the holidays or are you like me, doing last minute shopping and meal planning? In the midst of last minute activities, it seems like I’m bombarded by “last chance” emails, ads and signs everywhere I look. Today, I’m pondering “last chances” – of which there really are very few in life, and “second chances” – what we gift to ourselves and others when make new choices.
When you think about it for a minute, there are truly very few things in life that are last chances…. But if we end up missing a last chance at something important, it can be really hard to let go of feelings of regret and move on… and in looking back, we can easily end up missing second chances that are right there in front of us now. In this article, I’ll share with you 3 ways to shift out of last chanc-ing.
The problem with last chance thinking and acting is twofold and it runs on a very powerful emotion-based program.
Here is the problem with last-chances: 1) they prey on our tendency toward impulsivity, bypassing the higher-brain processes of reason and logic and, 2) they pull at our heart-strings, typically in ways that deplete our energy… as in “I should do x, y, or z, or else….”
This is because “last chances” are tied into old wired-in emotional patterns of fear and regret. Fear and regret are very powerful because they keep us looking backward at the past and/or lock us into anxiety about the future never presenting us with an opportunity again.
When we dissect it this way, it’s easy to see how dysfunctional last chance thinking and acting really is!
Here is a personal example I just experienced. My younger brother, John, today is happy, well-adjusted, employed and in a committed relationship. Five years ago, he was homeless, alone and literally wandering in the desert in Arizona. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. He had been missing for about 3 years. The last time I saw him was in 2007 when I left him at a rehab center for indigent people. He had spiraled into alcoholism after our mom died in 2002 and his wife left him. He had run out of “one last chances” with me as I had learned how to stop enabling his addiction.
A few years later in 2010, I was playing the Radical Forgiveness game called “Satori” that is featured in my film, Sacred Journey of the Heart. Satori is a board game created by Colin Tipping, that takes the players through all 5 steps of Radical Forgiveness that I depict in the film. Playing the game results in reframing issues to a new perspective that literally shifts reality in small and sometimes huge ways.
Each player “randomly” selects an issue from a stack of cards and plays the game around that particular issue. The card I picked for the game that day in 2010 was “Alcohol and Drugs have affected your life” and the context was Family. So obviously, I was being led to dive deep into Radical Forgiveness about my brother John’s alcoholism. It was one of the toughest games of Satori I ever played. Through the process, I was able to look at how I still blamed myself for not doing enough for him, not just through his addiction, but when we were growing up and I was trying to fill in for an absent dad and a stressed out mom who had gone to back to school to get her master’s degree after her divorce. I was able to shift into a new perspective about the events around his addiction and see what the experience did “for” me vs “to” me. It helped me untangle my lack of self-forgiveness and enter into deep forgiveness for my brother and through him, for myself.
Literally 10 days after I played the Satori game in August 2010, my brother was found in the desert, brought back to our hometown in the Midwest and entered into a very strict rehab program. All he had to his name was a change of clothes. He didn’t even have an ID card. Less than 10% of the people entering the rehab program complete it. My brother was one of the successful graduates.
Today, he is sober, he has rebuilt his life, he has a good job and he is living in a committed and happy relationship. It is a miracle that was built on radical forgiveness, his hard work, the support of many people and the second chance he received to start again.
The other day he called to ask me for a recipe of one of our mom’s favorite holiday breakfast casseroles. I told him it was in the 3-ring binder book that my mom gave to each one of us before she died. The book contained her favorite recipes, favorite poems and the original artwork and poetry she created as she was dying from brain cancer. It was a gift we all cherished because it contained so many fond memories and her expressions of love which came through her cooking, poetry and art.
John reminded me that he had lost the book of our mom’s precious gift. I said to myself, “Ah! That’s right! He had literally lost every single thing he owned from his past.”
Of course, I emailed him the recipe right away but in that moment, I knew what to give my brother this Christmas. One by one, I copied each page from the 3 ring binder book from our mother. The recipes are in black and white, the artwork and poetry are in color – about 250 pieces of paper and several hours of my time were spent in gratitude that my mom left us such an amazing gift. And in deep gratitude that my brother had not at all “lost” this part of his past: the legacy of love from our mom that I could give back to him.
I believe that there are always second chances for love. Radical Forgiveness opened my heart in 2010 and I got my brother back. And my brother is getting the gift from our mother back!
I’ve continued my exploration of emotions and the brain, the heart and the mind since 2010. I’ve discovered that doing the HeartMath program, Voyage to Heart Intelligence, activates the power of our hearts and creates many second chances for love and great moment-to-moment connections with the present moment.
And my latest discovery, Brain Tek’s brain wave entrainment program, caps it all off by unwiring stuck pathways in the brain that tend to resurface during stressful times. Brain Tek’s personalized sound therapies literally create new pathways in the brain that end worry, rumination, anxiety and procrastination.
I will be comparing all three programs next Monday, December 29th 2014 at 5 pm Mountain time. My primary focus will be Brain Tek – if you’ve missed my other free webinars, here’s your second chance to learn how to permanently change old patterns and give yourself the gift of living in the present!
For information on how to join the free webinar email: ronna@sacredjourneyoftheheart.com
Happy Holidays!
Permanent Peace
See info at the end of this post for a free webinar, Thursday, December 4 at 6 pm Mountain Daylight TimeDo gratitude and peace go hand-in-hand or is it possible to experience one without the other?
This is the question I’m pondering as I get ready to prepare the Thanksgiving feast I will have with friends and family tomorrow.
My personal answer is that I believe we can feel and express gratitude and NOT feel peaceful inside – but by contrast, we CANNOT feel peaceful without feeling grateful at the same time. Make sense?
It should if you think about it. Here’s an example:
It’s easy to feel grateful for the things that we have in the moment – family, relationships, health, jobs, shelter, food, clean water and transportation to get to get to where we need to go. At the same time, it’s common for people to feel anxious about the future and losing any one of these things. In other words, it’s common to feel grateful for the present and to worry about the future. It’s also common to feel grateful about the present and to feel depressed about the past. When we live this way, gratitude can quickly wash away with the next wave to hit the shore.
BUT if you are truly at peace, deep peace, you are not sad about the past or worried about the future. In the present moment, the only moment we have, the backdrop of our experience is a feeling of gratitude for everything that has happened, and a knowingness that whatever the future brings, we can still choose to come from this inner place of peace.
In my film Sacred Journey of the Heart, I actually described this state of being grateful for the past and everything that happened to me, including a childhood of abuse. And I courageously ended the film saying that “my heart will lead the way”, to whatever the future had in store for me. But I really wasn’t at peace- not yet – because my brain actually did not know how to function this way!
Literally, my brain was hard-wired for hyper-vigilance, a state of being on guard for impending threats. My nervous system was locked in to a low grade anxiety that could spike to intense anxiety at a moment’s notice. My limbic system, the emotional part of our brain, was programmed for sadness that sometime tipped into low-grade depression. And a deep brain structure, called the cingulate gyrus, that is actually shaped like a loop, kept me wired into a pattern of rumination and worry about “what if….” And worst case scenarios – all so I could be prepared in case of danger.
As you undoubtedly know, this is in no way, connected to a state of inner peace. I was grateful, but I was not at peace.
If this sounds familiar, I can also tell you that there is a way out of this, and it is easy, relatively quick and it is lasting. The result is that state of being that I call Permanent Peace.
The problem is, you can’t get to Permanent Peace unless you can get at the underlying pattern that the brain defaults to in times of uncertainty and stress. For me, this is the Missing Link. It’s what I discovered in my 4 week Behavioral Relationship Entrainment program offered by Brain Tek, a cutting edge research group in California. I’m now certified to offer this to my clients which I’ve been doing for a few months with great results all the way around. Here is a typical comment after a client has been through the “un-wiring – re-wiring” brain/behavioral program:
“The Brain Tek program has been one of the most positive things I’ve done for myself. I am happier, more patient and less anxious. I’m more organized, and motivated and get more done in a day than I did in a week. I can’t thank Ronna enough for introducing me to Braintek.”
Katie J. LCSW
What is Permanent Peace?
I believe it’s an inner state grounded upon understanding, acceptance, and trust. For me personally, there is also a very prominent spiritual component to this that I practice in daily prayer and meditation. I am now able to consistently be in this deep inner place of peace, because my deep brain structures that reacted to past experiences are freed up. My higher cortical reasoning function, i.e. the frontal cortex of my brain, can now choose to be at peace, rather than run my response based on past patterns.
Permanent Peace includes:
- Freedom from anxiety, worry and rumination
- Alleviation of depression
- Elimination of fear (which I call “Familiar Energy Arising Repetitively”)
- Ability to enjoy the moment
- Staying focused on one’s core values and ethics
- Contributing to the betterment of other’s lives
- Equanimity in the face of the unknown
- Feeling connected to everyone and everything without identifying with it
In this state, gratitude is natural, it flows and it becomes the foundation for everyday life, not just a special day, a time of prayer or a response to something good happening. This is permanent peace, and it does surpass understanding. I do believe it is possible and I have experienced it in my life and seen it in the lives of others who dive in to the cause of anxiety, fear and depression – unwiring the deep brain structures so that our personal practices can direct the flow of our lives.
If you are interested in learning more, please join me on Thursday, December 4, 2014 at 6 pm Mountain time for more information about Brain Tek and the program that rewires your brain for Permanent Peace.
Title: BRE Program Presentation
Time: Thursday, December 4th at 6:00pm Mountain
Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast
To attend, visit:
http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=62868234
Phone Number: 
(425) 440-5100
Pin Code: 339751#
Happy Thanksgiving and many blessings,
Ronna
A quick “go-to” strategy and a longer term, permanent “fix”
Have you ever prepared to confront someone who has said or done something that you need to address? If you reflect on a conflict-confrontation, you might recall how much time you spent thinking and rehearsing what you would say and you can probably remember the feelings you had around the event, including physiological sensations: nervousness, anxiety, sweaty palms, pounding heart, shortness of breath and queasy stomach. The physical signs are all related to the adrenal fight-flight response and it literally wears the body down with stress related hormones like cortisol.
Because of the intensity of the feelings, many of us have learned how to avoid most conflicts. Our “go-to” strategy is to just let IT go, to say “it’s ALL good”, and move on. This works sometimes because not all conflict is worth confronting.
But on big issues, there’s a cost to this caving in and not standing up for ourselves. And the cost encompasses many things: lower self-esteem, living in compromise, and sometimes loss of money.
Having experienced this myself and come out the other side, I know this is one of the most important life skills to master and to be at ease when dealing with conflict and standing up for myself!
Courage
Is there a quick fix for this? In my experience, yes and no. I have made a lot of progress in handling conflict over the years by utilizing cognitive and spiritual programs and techniques. I’ve done things like learn to tell myself to “stop”, take a breath and choose to let it go or to speak up. I’ve practiced the Sedona Method, an innovative system in which you ask yourself a series of questions. When an unwanted feeling comes up, you can release it using this method. This comes in handy when dealing with fear and anxiety over conflict. I’ve also tried other techniques such as EMDR, EFT, Psych-K and a whole alphabet soup list of things.
I’ve even become certified in and teach the very powerful and effective techniques of HeartMath and Radical Forgiveness. Like the others I’ve mentioned, these techniques work if you work with them.
I repeat: They all work. Yes, they do! But for me at least, they only worked temporarily and most of the time, it felt like pushing the same boulder up the same mountain. A lot of effort that resulted in me feeling tired, and then “letting it go”, eventually caving in.
So, bottom line and long term, at least from my perspective, the true answer was “no”, there was no quick fix or lasting solution for dealing with conflict.
That is until this year, 2014, when I learned that my conflict-avoidance, cave-in behavior was hard wired into my brain’s neuro-pathways. Now I can say that there IS a fix, and it’s relatively quick and it’s permanent!
My conclusion, based on experience, is that the missing link is the hard-wiring in a structure deep in the brain that contributes to resurfacing of old patterns. Cognitive and spiritual programs do not directly address the physiology of our brain. So what occurs is that while we can think our way through conflict, meditate, pray and spiritually understand what’s occurring, the underlying physiological wiring is still deeply embedded in the brain. Eventually we revert to this. This is why so many of us have tried multiple things that eventually give up on and may even find ourselves saying “nothing works”! You CAN unplug from this pattern!
Here is brain-based solution that you can test drive and begin to unwire old stress-based patterns in the privacy of your own home. It’s called Brain Tek Mobile Solutions and is an easy way to begin to release the brain-based stress response.
Click here for Brain Tek Solutions
I recommend listening to the Stress Relief Mobile Sound Therapy to calm your brain and then make better decision about dealing with conflict.
A more personalized approach is to explore the Behavioral Relationship Entrainment program that I offer through Brain Tek Institute. This has proven to be the missing link to easy and effective change that I have been searching for. It is proving to be the same thing for my clients that have gone through the program with me.
Last month I presented the BRE program in a webinar with Dr. Dennis Manness, it’s founder. BRE is an innovative and very unique sound-based protocol that literally re-boots your brain by rewiring neural pathways to more efficient and optimal thought-behavior patterns.
If you are interested in learning more, email me or stay tuned for the next free webinar on this topic in early December. The Brain Tek program is very different from brain-wave entrainment programs that you may have heard about. This new program that I’m certified to administer is individually tailored to create new neural pathways in your brain in 4 to 6 weeks, all in the comfort of your own home, as you listen to signals embedded in music that are tailored to address your particular issues. It’s the easiest and most effective process I have discovered or myself and am now sharing with my family, friends and clients. And, unlike any other program I’ve tried or taught, it exceeds expectations with the positive results!
Free Conference call to learn more about this topic: See end of article for info.
If you’ve ever felt that you are stuck in the “same-old, same-old” routine, it may be time to leap out of the rut and into something entirely new! I found myself in just that place in late Spring when certain things in my life and business had gotten stagnant and stuck. I felt sort of like this cow:
Stuck on a fence
Knowing that I have a tendency “rock the boat” big-time and end up in deep water, I decided it was time to find an easier pathway to creating change without bringing on a perfect storm in my life! Read the rest of this entry
5 Heart Warming C’s: Curiosity, Circulation, Correlation, Coherence, Commitment
“It’s time to lift the spirit of depression of each one around us….to melt the ice in the heart of humanity”.
This is one of my favorite lines in Sacred Journey of the Heart film, spoken by Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, nicknamed “Uncle”, a Greenland Eskimo-Kalaallit Elder and shaman. Uncle is a passionate advocate for indigenous and environmental issues that impact us all. At the heart of it all, according to Uncle, is a world-wide disconnect from our hearts and heart of earth itself. I concur.
As I’ve learned from the Institute of HeartMath, our heart is the key organ that regulates the synchronization of the body as a whole. If you haven’t seen the film, you will enjoy the evidence presented by Dr. Rollin McCraty, HeartMath’s lead scientist and Gregg Braden, NYT best-selling author and researcher that transforms our understanding about the power of the heart. They also provide astounding evidence that there IS a collective heart, and an undeniable connection between the human heart and the earth.
Graphic from Sacred Journey of the Heart© Read the rest of this entry
3 techniques that work quickly and easily!
As I revealed in the film, Sacred Journey of the Heart, like so many others, I experienced child abuse growing up. It colored every aspect of my life as an adult, from friendships, to intimate relationships, to jobs and to parenting. I was always on the lookout, waiting for the next bad thing to happen so I could be prepared. Talk about a waste of energy! Not to mention the present moments I missed by being on the defensive.
However, I am dedicated to the path of healing and I have tried more healing modalities that I can name. But it was in the making of the film itself, that deep and lasting freedom began to emerge for me. As I know it can for you too. And the good news is that it isn’t as hard as you might think!
The rest of this article is for you if you’ve ever had thoughts of:
- “I’m not good enough.”
- “What I want or say doesn’t really matter to others.”
- “I’m stuck.” or
- “No matter how hard I try, things just don’t change.”
Isn’t it time to be free of those self-limiting beliefs? Aren’t YOU worth the investment in 30 minutes a day to free yourself of these patterns?
My personal journey:
Like many people, things looked good on the outside – family, job, all the material things we accumulate to give us comfort, but on the inside, I felt like a fake. I just hoped no one noticed that I was afraid of being found out, and that I felt unworthy to be making a film about the heart’s journey when my heart still periodically was wrenched with pain, guilt and self-doubt. You know what they say: “You teach what you most need to learn.”
I was in the process of truly learning to liberate my heart and it took me to the place of deepest healing: the healing of false and self-limiting beliefs.
The Three Techniques:
Like Dr. Rocco Errico says in the film: “Healing the heart is like a diet, no one size fits all.”
So I’ll share with you 3 techniques, all which are aimed at deep heart healing and lead to true freedom from the past.
If you’ve seen the film, you know that the first turning point for me was Radical Forgiveness, a 5 step process developed by Colin Tipping. These 5 steps in a nutshell are: telling your story (Briefly), feeling your feelings, collapsing the story (separating the facts from the fiction you made up around it), reframing the story (shifting out of the victim mode) and then integrating your new story. You can see these 5 steps in action in Chapter 2 of the film, “How We Heal”. This is an amazing and quick process. I offer my coaching clients a 3 session RF package that creates lasting change.
The second technique I learned in making the film was the Freeze Frame technique created by the Institute of HeartMath. This is another 5 step process where you learn to bring in the power of your heart’s intuition to quickly get to the “heart of the matter”, and integrate a more efficient attitude, action or solution to the issue you are facing. I teach this in the 4 week “Voyage to Heart Intelligence” program, a proprietary program that can only be taught by licensed HeartMath Coaches.
The third and latest technique I’ve learned is how to get at the very cellular level of limiting beliefs that are carried inside each cell and that create a dissonant vibration that effects our health, feelings and sense of well-being. This is a technique created by Dr. Alex Loyd. I will be featuring my interview of him and a very special offer for you to be introduced to his teachings in the next newsletter.
For those of you who don’t want to wait, email me and I will send you a special access code to my interview and offer. With this approach I feel that the healing is coming full circle, all the way to the cellular level of heart-pictures that were formed before I even knew what was happening. It’s been another journey of deep liberation and completes the healing cycle, giving rise to True Independence from the past hurts. It creates a new sense of freedom to determine exactly how I will respond in any situation, how I choose to react when things happen and how I have become even more liberated from external circumstance as a dependent factor in my own inner peace.
Happy Freedom Day!
ronna@sacredjourneyoftheheart.com
If you’ve ever faced an unexpected event that threatened to derail something you’ve worked on for a long time, you know, as I do, that it’s a good idea to have a strategy or two to in place in order to react quickly and effectively and, with your intellect functioning under full power. I was reminded of this last week, the day before our screening of Sacred Journey of the Heart to international distributors during the Cannes Film Festival. I’m very grateful I was able to tap into my “Presence-Peace-Power” equation, because I certainly needed it!
I had lived through plenty of times where my default pattern was to go into what I now identify as Presumption-Panic-Impairment. As I revealed in the film, this pattern originated in my past of childhood abuse. All my HeartMath training and Radical Forgiveness work in the course of making the film gave me the healing tools I needed so that I would not: a) “presume the worst”, b) go into a panic and then c) make decisions and take actions that were “intellectually impaired”. We know now that the under stress and panic, the body marshals its reserves for a real battle, moving blood and oxygen supplies away from the higher cortical thinking centers of the brain and into the large muscles of the legs, arms and chest to prepare for action. This state does not facilitate good intellectual decision making!
It was Sunday morning and my distribution representative mentioned to me that I needed to bring my film’s blu-ray disk to the projection office for the screening the next day, Monday night at 8 pm. I was on my way out the door to attend a producers’ breakfast workshop and looking forward to an interesting day. When he told me this, my heart felt like it stopped for a moment, and I said, “Um, what do you mean me? I’m supposed to deliver a blu-ray disk? I don’t have one with me in France! I thought you had everything we needed for the screening!” He reminded me that we had emailed about this a few months ago — and then my heart felt like it actually dropped, when I had to admit, “OMG, I forgot! The blu-ray disks are in my office in Phoenix!” 
I could feel my old panic pattern begin raise its head as my heart was gearing up to start pounding. The second I felt this sensation, I stopped and focused on my heart, and consciously slowed down my breathing and my heart rate itself as I internally told myself, “ease-up, take a minute, slow down”. I had learned HeartMath’s latest technique called “Inner Ease” when I completed my training last December and this was my immediate go-to technique. Instead of allowing my imagination to go down the road of seeing a room full of distribution professionals and no film for them to view, I focused on tapping into a feeling of easing up and staying in Presence – or the present moment. We had time, albeit not much, to find a solution!
I was able to consciously slow down my heart rate because I’ve practiced heart coherence for a few years now. As a result, I can prevent myself from going into a full physiological adrenal stress response when it’s not needed. I’m sure I had a small burst of adrenaline but this is not a bad thing when you know how to come back to balance quickly. As Dr. Deborah Rozman, President of HeartMath LLC, says in the film, “In a state of coherence, you learn to live from a place where your heart and brain are in balance, your decisions are better and you don’t wear out your body!”
If you’re interested in learning the specific techniques of how to do this too, I’ll be teaching a 3 hour online HeartMath webinar that you can attend from anywhere as long as you have a computer and the internet. The webinar will include specific instructions on the Inner Ease practice and a number of other effective HeartMath techniques to use in these types of situations as well as in ordinary day to day interactions. The webinar will take place on June 14 from 9 to noon, Pacific time. Click here for more details.
After a minute or so of going into presence and inner peace, I was able to take effective action. I got on the phone to Fed Ex in the USA to find out if they could move heaven and earth and get a DVD from Arizona to southern France in less than 48 hours, beginning on a Sunday (it turns out they could!) At the same, we asked our distribution rep to call the film screening office at the Palais in Cannes to find out if they could project a high quality replicated DVD, of which I had brought plenty with me to France. It took about 30 minutes to get it all sorted out, but the good news is that from this place of power, versus panic, we were able to get to a quick and easy solution. And I didn’t put myself into massive physiological stress in the time that it took for us find the best solution for the issue at hand.
We had a full theater for our film screening on Monday night and the film looked as beautiful as ever (thanks Skip and Scott, our director and editor!) I encourage you to give yourself the gift of learning some practical techniques that improve the quality of your life in every day situations as well as those unexpected occurrences that inevitably come up!
Have you ever had one of those days when things were just not working out? I had one of those days yesterday and rather than bore you with the details, I’ll just share what I did to get out of the pits and into the place of positive perspective. I call it L-A-U-G-H! And I share my “laugh resources” below. But first, did you know that on Tuesday, May 6, a new world laughter record was set by 1,950 elders in Dada Dadi park in Borivli, India? Here’s a great photo of the group in action!
We know that laughter can be the best medicine. Norman Cousins’ groundbreaking work on laughter changed the way we think about emotion and healing 38 years ago. Read the rest of this entry
Have you ever thought about how the 5 major initiatives resulting from the Earth Day movement have a correlation in your personal life and your interactions with others? As a result of the first Earth Day celebration on 4-22-1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was founded and the first three major Acts were passed: The Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts. A few decades later, towards the end of the 1990s, two additional major initiatives began: The Global Warming and the Clean Energy Initiatives.
It occurred to me that there is a very strong connection between our own personal interactions and the 5 acts and initiatives that have emerged over the 44 years of Earth Day celebrations. I’ll share these below and invite you to explore how they reflect on your personal contributions and interactions with people and the earth itself. The exciting thing is that this is not about soft, woo-woo concepts. The correlations I suggest below are based on scientific research and practical applications in our daily lives that can make a difference on a very large scale! Read the rest of this entry
3 easy steps!
We’ve all heard that speaking in public is the #1 fear reported in most surveys about fears and phobias. For most people, it ranks above fear of failure and fear of death. To me, fear of public speaking is an extension of a deeper issue: fear of speaking from the heart.
What if you had no fear of speaking from your heart, not just in public, but in your relationships, at work and even in those day to day interactions that contain small (or large) annoyances, like someone crowding in front of you in a line, being treated rudely by a store clerk or being ignored?